Burned on the pyre
by impampersand
Summary: "You gonna fight this one too?" Yancy asks. And you don't understand, not consciously, not yet, but you speak anyways. "That's what we always did, didn't we?" Raleigh Becket, after the foiled end of the world. Crossposted.


You've never really had time to think about the future. Not as the small child falling through the ice, terrified that your brother won't be able to save you from the cold, the waters that want to swallow you up.

Not when Maman was smoking and dying and not when ithat asshole/i had just bugged out and it was you and Yance and Jaz. Not when it was you alone carving out survival along the coast.

Couldn't dream of the future when you couldn't fucking dream in the first place, just a winding loop of-

_"-Raleigh listen to me-"_

-couldn't fucking think in the chopper. Not in what the Marshall names the last days of wars, the most desperate of days. Not while you cross the murky gray horizon of the Pacific.

Like you told Mako, you've always had horrible timing. Couldn't land the killshot until the overlap of your/Yancy's brains broke in the worst way possible. Couldn't keep your brother safe long enough for his last thought pre-hull breach to be verbalized fully.

You get it. The best of you is your status as a dynamic and unfamiliar variable. But you're cocky and unpredictable, even now. Those characteristics carried you and Mako into the Breach, and then back again.

You've had a job since you first submitted paperwork to the Jaeger Academy-protect against the Kaiju, stop them-and now you've finally finished it. Fucking finally.

You are one of the last of the PPDC's active duty rangers: a dying breed, to be sure, numbering a grand total of three. Four if you count that Aussie dog, and face it: he probably counts. It's like that memorial comic for Steve Irwin, strapping him into a cockpit alongside a croc or something. You're willing to bet hard candy that Mako is something like drift compatible with that dog. Which has interesting connotations regarding the Aussies, but that's an unproductive line of thought.

The drift still buzzes between you and Mako in the wake of the end of the end of the world, but it's not as frenetic as you remember. Five years' aging, permanent injury, and hard living have shaved you down. Also, approximately twentyfour hours of arousal, along with several engagements with kaiju and hours of the drift.

You didn't know the triplets, but you remember the Russians. They were always something of a legend. So many Rangers lost across the years and finally, finally all the training and loss and sacrifice have come to something lasting.

Victory and grief have their own place between and around you and Mako and the entire Shatterdome. It's been too long and personal a war for it to be anything else. You're settled on Mako's hospital bed because she's unbalanced by loss and the ghostdrift and you want to soothe that, what little you can.

It's not everything.

Your drifts with Yancy taught you that-even when thoughts bounce between two minds like one, there are still things that must be voiced and tested, there are still sorries to be said.

You think it helps. Maybe just a little bit.

Doctors and their aides swarm in and around you on a timeline they refuse to explicitly state, but this is not the first time you've been under watch for acute radiation poisoning.

They watch you and Mako chug your ways through bottles of what Gatorade would be if its power was over 9000.

The doctors say, eventually, that you can go. They offer you a tin with your details-exactly in the style of Pentecost's, you wonder when they had time to make it, you left your old tin behind somewhere, took Yancy's instead-and remind you to take your Metharocin daily.

They don't thank you for your part in saving the world, but they nod respectfully and leave Mako watching you. With the passing hours the ghostdrift has eased away towards nothing, but you still have a lingering heightened awareness of one another.

You leave the infirmary together, too wrung out to contemplate the party that will be starting up-or maybe even has already started up, Tendo always was the sort to have an illicit secret stash of bagels, caffeine, and alcohol. And the probable shipments of vodka alongside weapons of mass destruction for the Russians.

No more PPDC sanctioned food grade alcohol, you think, sir no sir.

It doesn't take you long to lapse into sleep, even with the wavering drag of ghostdrift and usual insomniac's sleep patterns. You think muzzily of jet-helicopter-lag when Mako's proximity wakes you; you rouse enough to usher her into your room with your ghosts' smiles pinned to the wall (not her's, you think she needs the space from her own, you know what this kind of koss feels like too) but not enough to communicate verbally.

It's a confusing muddle of hours until you wake again, legs tangled with Mako's as the two of you sprawl across the narrow bunk. You're tired still, but you can and do blame that on the exertions of the last few days and chronic insomnia.

You shut your eyes to rest them, like they haven't been resting for hours now, and your mind loops in a waking dream of-

_"-Raleigh listen to me-_

_"-love ya bro-"_

-and raucous laughter, drunk on the drift, adrenaline, _success_, the crew that had helped you and Yance take care of your girl, who fit your drive suits into place and then took them away like unnecessary pieces of carapace exoskeleton.

You drift into some kind of dream state, drift sequence blue tinting Mako's memories a surreal, ghostly quality-and softening your own to some offshoot of soothing.

You dream of overexposed spaces, with gray afternoon light bouncing harshly about-against clouds and snowbanks, finally softening as it passed through the slightly murky windows of the house you grew up in, the last place you saw your Maman breathe easily on her own, the last place Yance was only eldest son not responsible almost adult.

You dream about the soft rumble of Maman and Jaz's voices together, somewhere else in the house. And Yance looks at you, face older than it should be, smiling sadly at you.

"You gonna fight this one too?" Yancy asks.

And you don't understand, not consciously, not yet, but you speak anyways. "That's what we always did, didn't we?"

"Do it for yourself, Rals," your brother says, and your throat tightens with some unknown knot of emotion so you only nod.

Yance's tired smile brightens and abruptly you recognize a deep ache radiating from your joints, like a fresh burn from your suit's overloaded circuits. You stop, begin to cry out, and Yance reaches out as if to soothe-

-but the dream dissipates like the smoke from Maman's cigarettes and you wake, Mako's foot jamming your chin up awkwardly. She is dreaming of the father she just lost, tranquil in the way children are assured of their parents' protection. You let her sleep.

You're given the grace of one day before the media tour begins. Your bruises bloom; except for portraits incompletely marking the costs to rangers' bodies, the injuries that could not be prevented by all of your girl's internal shock absorbers are hidden away with artful makeup and immaculate dress blues.

There is a memorial service in Hong Kong; nuclear containment measures begin in the harbor, clean up begins for kaiju blue, recovery of Cherno and Crimson starts.

There is a press conference that freshly shows your face and Mako's to the world, which gasps and murmurs excitedly over Tokyo's Survivor and the Revived Becket. You wish you had it in you to laugh about how they speak of you like some kind of white Jesus.

You wish, but you're too tired. Tendo commandeers an unbranded plane to fly Mako to Honolulu. She asks you to come so you nod and take the seat next to her.

The Marshall's old copilot was treated at one of the local hospitals and was eventually interred in the Punchbowl. Military is military; the PPDC isn't quite one, but it's close enough to give you anonymity on the hike to Tamsin's grave marker and consideration of the other two names engraved on it. You think about three members of the British RAF, memorialized in a US military cemetery for their parts in a conflict an ocean away.

You spend the night in Waikiki, playing at being tourists sufficiently scarred-perhaps chemically, from Kaiju Blue-to wear light but encompassing clothes despite the heat and humidity. You wander alongside Mako for hours, watching the other touristas babble amongst themselves and bemoan sunburns like cooked lobsters.

You feel like a spectator, detached from the rest of the tourist crowd. Mako has the same look about her. She conceals it more efficiently. Still, there's a certain unratcheting of tension when the crowd peters off and you have the streets to yourselves-almost like a ghost town, the lights fade as the consumers leave for dinner and the workers head home-comfortably warm and dark.

You think about how warm sand feels under bare feet and you propose a trip to one of the beaches to Mako-for later on. She watches you for a moment and lights up into a quick smile, agreeing easily enough.

Eventually you wander back to your hotel room to sleep in an odd tangle of limbs. In the morning Mako heads out to one of the local Buddhist temples-the Byodo-In Temple, established to commemorate the first Japanese immigrants to the area but also modelled off of the temple in Uji, lost after critical structural damage in 2019; Cherno and Crimson had destroyed the kaiju, but one more World Heritage site was lost.

Mako would have taken you with her and it would have been fine, but-you remember the greater Byodo-In Temple, seen a year or two before Tokyo Survivor began to be tossed about by world media reporters. You let her have her space, to separate her parents from your own.

You watch the streets move below you for an hour before setting out, hailing a taxi and directing it to the Queen's Cancer Center. It's not a long drive, even with commuters on their way to work and year-round schooling sending buses and pedestrians about. You aimlessly watch the varied building faces, before the taxi slows to a halt. It's slightly surprising that you have cash to pay the driver with, but Tendo had winked and prepped you before the trans-Pacific flight.

It's surprisingly easy to approach the center, to not halt before the automatic doors. You need to know so you maintain forward movement until there's only a desk between you and the receptionist.

"Hi," you say, "I, uh, have an appointment."

You need some time afterwards so you set out walking afterwards. You think about ghosts that can only move in straight lines so you make some random turns. Not quite an hour later finds you in front of a store advertising shave ice, which-you shrug inwardly to yourself, white boy you in one of the few areas where you're (kind of) a population minority and a mainlander to boot-you feel sufficiently overheated to justify lonesome experimentation.

You're hooked.

You email Mako a selfie that manages to include the store name and watch people line up for their own treats. Soon enough Mako is there with you, looking a lot like Jaz being coaxed to try something new and unknown on another trip. (That's another weight that you carry, that you weren't there for her while she died, that she was young enough to just be left behind with Uncle Charlie while you and Yance scarpered off to training.) On the other hand, Jaz would probably have turned up her nose and grumbled about not having to leave Alaska to get some snow. But. Mako at least is delighted and begins eating as you walk down the sidewalk together.

While Mako digs in you feel the sun press against your sun-starved skin and watch your ice melt. Without thinking about it you slow to a halt.

"Raleigh?" Mako asks, turning towards you. "Is there something wrong?"

You don't want to admit it, to say it out loud and make it that much more real. But you owe it to her. You owe her the truth and you owe it to yourself as well.

You don't want her to find you collapsed and gasping for breath, terrified and not knowing.

"I have leukemia."

You remember the desolation in her eyes following Pentecost's last speech, never wanted to see it again. It's not the same thing in her eyes now, but it's close.

"What do you want to do?" Mako asks.

"I'm going to start treatment-but not right now. Right now I want to eat flavored ice with my copilot and walk barefoot in the sand."

A moment passes before Mako moves, but she nods smoothly and begins walking. The sand's heat is more satisfying than you expect and for now you are happy. You do this for yourself.


End file.
